What’s on TV Thursday: ‘Orphan Black’ and ‘Sister Act’

By JOSHUA BARONE

March 16, 2017

Season 4 of the thrilling sci-fi series “Orphan Black” arrives on Amazon. And Logo airs back-to-back “Sister Act” movies, for five hours of Whoopi Goldberg’s convent antics and musical comedy.

What’s Streaming

Tatiana Maslany in “Orphan Black.”

Ken Woroner / BBC America

ORPHAN BLACKon Amazon. The fourth season of this BBC America series about dubious science and self-aware clones — all portrayed with acrobatic, Emmy-winning acting by Tatiana Maslany — has arrived on streaming platforms for your bingeing pleasure.

A scene from “Coraline.”

Focus Features

CORALINE (2009) on Netflix. Neil Gaiman’s 2002 children’s novella “Coraline,” the inspiration for this movie, is slim and fast-paced. A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called Henry Selick’s adaptation, with 3-D stop-motion animation, “exquisitely realized.” Mr. Selick made a film that is “certainly exciting,” Mr. Scott wrote. “But rather than race through ever noisier set pieces toward a hectic climax in the manner of so much animation aimed at kids,” he continued, “‘Coraline’ lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.”

What’s on TV

SISTER ACT (1992) 5:30 p.m. on Logo. A Reno lounge singer hiding from a mob boss in a conservative convent — what could go wrong? Whoopi Goldberg stars in this ultimately big-hearted comedy, which features musical arrangements by Marc Shaiman (“Hairspray”) and script doctoring by the sorely missed Carrie Fisher. “The main lesson of ‘Sister Act,’” Janet Maslin wrote in a largely negative review in The Times, “is that many girl-group hits of the 1960s were even more divine than many of us originally realized.” The film, however, was enough of a commercial success to warrant a sequel: “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” (1993), which follows at 8:05. Original cast members — like Kathy Najimy, and Maggie Smith as the convent’s Mother Superior — return, and newcomers include Lauryn Hill.

GREY’S ANATOMY8 p.m. on ABC. ShondaLand’s Thursday night programming begins with this flagship drama, in which April and Jackson travel to Montana to perform surgery. On “Scandal,” at 9, Rowan is surprised by someone from his past, while Olivia has an important campaign decision to make. At 10, “The Catch” continues its sophomore season as the team members face off with an assassin hunting their new client.

Josh Brolin in “No Country for Old Men.”

Richard Foreman / Miramax Films and Paramount Vantage

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007) 8 p.m. on Showtime 2. This Coen brothers adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s noir novel, which won four Oscars including best picture, is widely regarded as filmmaking at its finest. Its villain, played by Javier Bardem, is “a figure of evil so calm, so extreme, so implacable that to hear his voice is to feel the temperature in the theater drop,” A. O. Scott wrote in The Times. But that chill, he added, is also a good sign. “‘No Country for Old Men’ is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked,” he wrote. “For formalists — those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design — it’s pure heaven.”